


What's One More Horror?

by J_E_McCormick



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Cannibalism, Gen, idk man the idea just came to my head
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 23:37:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11046708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/J_E_McCormick/pseuds/J_E_McCormick
Summary: When people were told Junkrat and Roadhog didn’t eat pork, they tended to make the assumption it was something to do with Roadhog. Which was stupid, really, because since when did liking an animal stop people from eating them?No, it was Junkrat who didn’t eat pork, couldn’t even stand the smell of it, and he had reasons much beyond a simple affinity for pigs.





	What's One More Horror?

**Author's Note:**

> Listen idk this is basically just 2000+ words of brain fart.
> 
> Brief explanation: human meat is sometimes called "long pork" because apparently we smell and taste like pork when cooked and consumed. ~The more you know~

When people were told Junkrat and Roadhog didn’t eat pork, they tended to make the assumption it was something to do with Roadhog. Which was stupid, really, because since when did liking an animal stop people from eating them? Junkrat was fond of wallabies; he still ate them whenever he could get his hands on them.

No, it was Junkrat who didn’t eat pork, couldn’t even stand the smell of it, and he had reasons much beyond a simple affinity for pigs.

~*~

Junkrat had been 15 when the small gang of Junkers he’d been with had been killed. They had only been a small group of maybe 6, all teens who had grown up in the Outback after the Omnium explosion. The oldest, Kicker, had only been 5 years older than Junkrat, but that was enough to give him an edge of experience which he’d used to teach the others in his gang the ways of their wild world. They didn’t have much, but they had enough. Enough to survive, and enough to get killed for.

Junkrat had managed to run. By then he’d seen three of his friends torn to pieces by scrap guns, and one other pinned into the dirt as she screamed. He didn’t know what had happened to the last – he got out of there before he spotted them, and then he ran and ran and ran until he hadn’t been able to any more. He’d collapsed down into the shade of a rock, rested a while, then checked his supplies and set off.

That was the start of his years alone.

It was hard. He’d grown up being part of a gang, sharing duties, swapping shifts, co-ordinated and organised, and surviving alone was so different. It was damn near impossible to catch wallabies or hares without a team, and he couldn’t sleep at night for fear of another gang trying to do him in for his meagre scraps.

He already knew how to deal with explosives, knew how to build them from scrap, and so that’s what he did. Loaded himself up with explosives, mines to set out at night and grenades to launch at any Junkers who got too close and too interested. He tried making the traps his old gang had used to catch rabbits and the like, but he’d never been the one to make them, and his memory on how to was fogged. His memory was always fogged, and he fucking hated it, fucking hated forgetting how Kicker had taught him to trap rats and Scrapheap had told him the best places to loot for parts and supplies. At least he remembered how to find water. Finding water and building explosives, those he could do, and those are what he did.

 –

Months went by, and Junkrat kept trying to scrape out a living for himself. He and his gang had been on their way to somewhere before they were killed, but where, Junkrat didn’t know. He’d lost track of where he was and where he was going after just a week of going it alone, and since then he’d just been wandering and hoping.

He’d found a few Junker outposts about, but nothing he could nick from. They were all too well guarded by much more people. Junkrat had only himself, and he knew that a peg-legged 15-year-old had no chance against a gang of fully grown, well-organised Junkers. Even if he did have a lot of grenades and mines. Grenades were great, and mines were brilliant, but you could only do so much with them, and you certainly couldn’t run away from Junkers on bikes with them.

Or could you? He’d have to think on that.

But either way, he hadn’t dared take on any of the outposts. He hadn’t seen any sort of sign of civilization, either, the kind were a bit of scrap and some money could get you supplies. All he had was his bag full of scraps, the explosives strapped to his back, a few boxes of anti-radiation tabs, and a spile he’d made himself.

That left him dangerously short on food.

He’d managed to catch a lizard a month back, and stumbled on a dead rat a few weeks before that. He’d found a few bits and pieces before then, but that was too long ago to remember. Two weeks ago, he’d found a termite mound and resorted to sticking his hand into it and licking off the termites that crawled onto it, desperate for something. They tasted bad, and he felt like he was eating as much sand as he was termites, but it just about took the sharp, terrible edge off the hunger he’d been feeling. He hadn’t found anything since then.

The only thing he could do was keep walking. Keep looking. Keep trying. He tried building more traps, which continued to fail. Once or twice, something stepped on a mine in the middle of the night, but when Junkrat got to it, it was blown to pieces, little more than a smear of blood on sand. At one point, he considered eating the sand to get at the blood soaked into it.

He's desperate when a group of Junkers find him raiding a scrap heap that probably used to be some form of vehicle. He was starting to consider attempting a raid – if he could cobble together a launcher for his grenades, maybe manage to put together some larger bombs, he could possibly be able to run in, grab some supplies, and go. That required a plan, though, and knowledge of where the stores were, and Junkrat was fairly sure his brain was starting to fry in his skull because he could never quite get past the explosion part of his plan…

He’s so distracted that they manage to sneak up on him, and he only realises they are there when scrap explodes next to his ear, tearing apart what might have once been a Jeep door.

“Shit!” Junkrat curses, jumping up and scurrying around the pile of junk. He grabs a grenade and throws it, waiting for the explosion and the shouts before peering over to look at the damage. One Junker is sprawled on his back, his legs gone – the grenade had landed at his feet, then. The others seem to have taken cover, but one of them peers out from behind a rock and Junkrat lobs another grenade in his direction.

“Take that ya cunts!” He yells over the sound of the explosion. More scrap shots hit his false leg from another direction, and he darts out of the way of further shots to throw another frag. This one obviously misses, as two Junkers come running at him before the explosion goes off. He bolts, and they follow, still trying to fire. Pieces of scrap catch Junkrat, but they never quite hit their target. He supposes it’s hard when the target is little more than scrap and bones.

He runs around a rock, quickly setting a mine in the path he took. A moment later, it goes off as one of the Junkers steps on it; it takes out the other by proximity. A smoking limb goes past Junkrat’s head. He stops and looks around – no more Junkers appear. He peers around the rock at the scrap heap – there’s no-one else there trying to scavenge or look for him. He seems to have taken out the lot.

He grins, giggling triumphantly as he kicks at the body under his feet. Humans don’t disintegrate into splatter when they’re blown up– his bombs are always a bit small for that. They tend to blow to pieces, sure, but there’s actually something left. Pity that didn’t happen with rats.

The smell of smoke and burnt fabric is almost comforting to Junkrat. The smell of charred and cooked flesh isn’t – it goes through him, making his stomach clench, reminding him of how hungry he is. He hasn’t eaten anything near decently for months – a few handfuls of termites and a lizard hardly the length of his hand has kept him alive, just. Just enough to stop him from starving, but hunger has been his companion since the day his previous ones died. He’s not sure how long it’s been since he had enough food to be able to really smell it cooking.

He jerks himself from his thoughts and hurries away to the ex-vehicle he had been raiding. More Junkers could come at any time, and he wants to get as much from this hoard as possible. He stuffs everything he can into the little pack he has at his side, until it is full. The whole time the smell of flesh clings to the inside of his nose, to the raw, primal part of his brain that screams hunger. He runs out of there as fast as he can, and tries to push the smell and the hunger from his head.

In the night, a mine goes off. Junkrat hurries to it, this time fully prepared to suck blood and guts from the sand if he has to. He doesn’t have to. He’s caught a Junker – if there were others, they’ve scattered, but this one seems to be alone. Night scavenging, there’s a thought; probably better for a lone Junker than open raids.

As before his mine has cooked the flesh – well, seared most of it, but to Junkrat, months starved, it practically smelled like a fucking banquet.

The Outback was a fucked up place, Junkrat knew this. Everyone in it had gone to hell and back and brought it with them. Jamison Fawkes had been found by a rag-tag gang of teens surviving on garbage, hidden in a hole with a rat’s nest for warmth. He’d blown his own leg off with an experimental frag grenade at the age of 10. He’d watched men die from the radiation that surrounded them, skin peeling from their muscles like someone was skinning them, bleeding them dry and twisting every organ. He’d seen people blown to bits, torn apart by scrap, gutted with machetes, and brained with bats. The Outback was a nightmare, and Junkrat had seen its horrors for himself.

What was one more?

Junkrat grabbed at a smoking, mangled leg and scurried back to the bedroll he’d been sleeping on. He tore into it, teeth pulling flesh from bone, and couldn’t muster up even a little disgust. If you wanted to survive in a fucked up place, he reckoned to himself, you had to be fucked up yourself.

–

About a month after that, he’d stumbled on the remains of the Omnium. There were more people there, and enough scrap to go around that people weren’t even killing each other for it. There were towns scattered around it’s vicinity, and Junkrat had managed to get fresh water, radiation tabs, and plenty of food rations. He’d stuck close by the towns and the Omnium for a while, managing to grab a map and figure out how to use it. No more getting stuck in the Outback.

He stocked up caches, making trips further and further afield to tuck away rations and scrap. After three years hanging around near the Omnium, he built up a good number of them, and a greater knowledge of the Outback wastes. He hardly even needed the map anymore, unless he was really feeling adventurous. He could feel his feet (…foot) itching to get going, to strike out on his own, start a real Junker’s life scouring the wastes for valuables, getting into scraps and scrapes and mischief. Besides, there was nothing here to blow up. It was far too peaceful.

Good thing he hadn’t been looking for peace, because the last thing he’d done had been to go and explore the depths of the Omnium. The place was irradiated to hell, and even most Junkers didn’t venture so close, but that made it all the better for a big hit. And a big hit he got – fucking huge, colossal, beyond his wildest dreams.

After that was a blur of being on the run. He had a huge bounty on his head and everyone wanted him and his treasure. At some point he’d lost his arm, wasn’t sure when. That had made shit difficult for a while, but then he managed to nick a prosthetic from a guy he proceeded to blow up, and with a bit of tinkering it was back to normal. Well, a few months were spent getting used to it – but then, back to normal. It was wild and fast-paced and explosive, and Junkrat fucking loved it. He went from cache to cache, camp to camp, raid to raid. And then he’d met Roadhog, and well, the rest was history.

~*~

Roadhog was the only one who knew the full story. No-one else needed to know, no-one else would want to know, and Junkrat kept the secret close. No need to tell everyone that he’d eaten the leg of some poor bugger who’d stepped on a mine, after months of starvation. No need to tell them that the smell of cooking pork was too close to that of searing human flesh, that it made him vomit from the memory of its taste on his tongue. Even by his standards, where it was perfectly reasonable to kill a guy trying to steal a piece of junk from you, where it was commonplace to throw kids out to the deserts if you had too many mouths to feed, eating human flesh was a taboo. Who knew the Outback still had its limits?

So, he let them think Roadhog was the kind of softie who didn’t like eating pork because he loved pigs and couldn’t bear to eat them – even if the thought made him laugh. Roadhog, a pansy vegetarian? Now there was a laugh.

It was better than telling them the truth, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeaaahhh I have no idea if this is good or not but it's been sat in my folders finished for ages so I decided what the heck.


End file.
